Stop Nuclear Waste Recycling into everyday products

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<arnoldgore

Stop Nuclear Waste Recycling into everyday products

 

 

LAST CHANCE TO TELL NRC: No Nuclear Waste in the Marketplace!

 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is considering issuing a new rule

allowing some radioactive materials to be treated as if they weren't

radioactive.

Such materials could then find their way into normal commerce, or municipal

landfills and garbage incinerators. For example, recycled metals could be

used

to make girders for an apartment building, spokes for the wheels on a baby’s

carriage or your next belt buckle. This would be a return to the agency’s

discredited “Below Regulatory Concern†policy, which was revoked by Congress

in

1992, following several years of citizen organizing and outrage.

 

The NRC currently is undertaking a “scoping†process to determine what

issues it will consider in this rulemaking. Originally published February

28, 2003,

the comment period on this scoping process ends June 30. We urge you to look

over the options below and submit brief comments to the NRC by that date.

Background information on this issue can be found on NIRS’ website, <A

HREF= " http://www.nirs.org/ " >www.nirs.org</A>.

 

NRC offers 5 options in its Scoping for Rulemaking. None of these options is

acceptable as is; very brief critiques of each option are provided below.

The

Sierra Club is proposing a sixth option.

 

Allowing currently licensed and regulated nuclear wastes to be cleared from

regulatory control in either a restricted or unrestricted way would result

in

unnecessary exposures to people and other living things. There are better

ways

to manage radioactive wastes.

 

If NRC decides to proceed with this rulemaking, it should concentrate on

identifying and requiring isolation, monitoring and management for the

hazardous

life of all the waste. The goal should be to keep track of and isolate

radioactivity and all materials contaminated with it, generated by nuclear

power and

weapons fuel chain industries, from the environment, workers and the public.

 

Option 1 Continuing unrestricted release on a case-by-case basis and through

license amendments:

NRC and Agreement States should stop granting exemptions and allowing

nuclear

wastes to be treated like regular trash or recycled into the marketplace.

Current releases should be halted. All releases should be tracked and

records

kept available to the public. NRC should improve its ability and public

knowledge

of detection capabilities and practices so as to able to detect and prevent

releases of any contamination.

 

Option 2 Unrestricted release based on dose based standards.

Dose-based standards are calculated doses from various amounts of

contamination at the point of release. The doses are calculated by

contractors who think

up scenarios of how the radiation will spread and disperse once it is

released

from the nuclear site. They apply International Commission on Radiological

Protection risk numbers to guess at how much biological damage that

radiation

might do. But they might not think up the scenarios that really

happen--people

and radionuclides are unpredictable. And ICRP has been criticized for

underestimating the real risks of radiation--their models were created

before the DNA

was discovered. And, most importantly, dose and risk numbers are not

measurable, verifiable or enforceable. So this option is an open door to

unlimited

amounts of nuclear waste getting out into commerce.

 

Option 3 Conditional use or Restricted Release

The public could get significant exposures from so-called restricted uses.

If

gamma-emitting nuclear waste is used to make roadbeds, we will be exposed

routinely on our daily commutes by car, bus, bike or on foot. If it is used

to

make sewage pipes, sewage will be even more contaminated if it picks up

radioactivity. Towns downstream of sewage facilities clean and reuse that

water. That

piping could get melted and reused for unrestricted uses. Restricted release

is a foot in the door for unrestricted release.

 

Option 4 Disposal in EPA landfills

NRC has not excluded incineration or other treatment facilities from

consideration as destinations for radioactive waste even though only

landfills are

identified as options. Landfills leak. Radioactive landfills have had

serious

problems. Why spread these potential problems to municipal, industrial and

hazardous waste landfills, already struggling with their own technical and

poli

tical problems? Nuclear waste should not be buried in dumps never designed

to

manage or isolate them as long as they remain hazardous. EPA landfills have

a 30

year institutional control period. Some of the radioactivity that could be

released is hazardous for literally millions of years.

 

Option 5

Radioactive waste should be stored, managed and isolated from the

environment

for as long as it is hazardous at facilities specifically licensed for that

purpose for radioactive waste. Existing regulations (10CFR 61) for nuclear

waste disposal should be strengthened. NRC should use this rulemaking to

truly

devise ways to control radioactive waste, not release it from licensed

control.

 

Option 6

Sierra Club is requesting NRC to recapture the radioactive wastes that

already have been released. Since the claim is made that these release have

had no

effect, Sierra asks them to prove it by identifying where the nuclear wastes

have gone and checking to see what effects there have been.

 

Send comments by JUNE 30, 2003!

Send your views to NRC at: US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC

20555 or

secy

 

United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on

“Rulemaking on Controlling the Disposition of Solid Materialsâ€

(Radioactive Waste and Materials Release, ‘Recycling,’ Dispersal)

Scoping Process for Environmental Issues

Federal Register: Feb. 28, 2003 Vol. 68 No. 40 Pp. 9595-9602

 

For more info, contact Diane D’Arrigo at NIRS dianed, 202 328-0002

ext 16. Thanks.